Oe 22 10 12668

Time domain multiplexed spatial division
multiplexing receiver
Roy G. H. van Uden,* Chigo M. Okonkwo, Haoshuo Chen,
Hugo de Waardt, and Antonius M. J. Koonen
COBRA Research Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
*
r.g.h.v.uden@tue.nl
Abstract: A novel time domain multiplexed (TDM) spatial division

multiplexing (SDM) receiver which allows for the reception of >1 dual
polarization mode with a single coherent receiver, and corresponding 4-port
oscilloscope, is experimentally demonstrated. Received by two coherent
receivers and respective 4-port oscilloscopes, a 3 mode transmission of
28GBaud QPSK, 8, 16, and 32QAM over 41.7km of few-mode fiber
demonstrates the performance of the TDM-SDM receiver with respect to
back-to-back. In addition, by using carrier phase estimation employing one
digital phase locked loop per output, the frequency offset between the
transmitter laser and local oscillator is shown to perform similar to previous
work which employs 3 coherent receivers and 4-port oscilloscopes which
are dedicated to the reception of each the three modes.
©2014 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (030.4070) Modes; (060.4230) Multiplexing; (060.1660) Coherent
communications.
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#205181 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jan 2014; revised 16 Apr 2014; accepted 17 Apr 2014; published 16 May 2014
(C) 2014 OSA 19 May 2014 | Vol. 22, No. 10 | DOI:10.1364/OE.22.012668 | OPTICS EXPRESS 12668
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1. Introduction
It is undisputed that the demand for capacity in optical transmission systems has been
growing in the past, and will continue to do so in the next decade. Although, the continuous
annual growth rate (CAGR) of traffic over time is slowing down, it is expected to converge to
approximately 30-40% in 2020 [1]. Therefore, it is a clear indication that carriers are to
provide for this exponential capacity growth, to avoid an upcoming capacity crunch. This
creates a challenging goal for research: increase the capacity limits of optical transmission
systems.
In the past, first the serial baud rate was increased, before adding parallel wavelengths
carrying information in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical transmission
systems. Around 1998, polarization division multiplexing (PDM) started to attract attention
[2]. The following decade, enabled by coherent transmission and 2 × 2 multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing (DSP), the capacity of coherent optical dual
polarization (DP) transmission systems annually increased by approximately 25% [3]. This
however, was clearly not sufficient to meet the CAGR. Therefore, a new way of substantially
increasing the transmission capacity had to be investigated.
One method to substantially increase the transmission capacity is mode group diversity
multiplexing, also known as spatial division multiplexing (SDM). In 2005, the main impact in
SDM was made using direct detection in multimode fiber [4], and interest in coherent SDM
systems increased in 2010 [5,6]. Within one year, the first DP 3 linearly polarized (LP) mode
coherent SDM transmission system was demonstrated [7], which required three 4-port
oscilloscopes and corresponding optical coherent receiver front-ends. The 4 ports are used to
receive the in-phase (real) and quadrature (imaginary) components of the complex transmitted
constellations, for each of the two polarizations. Within a year, the number of simultaneously
transmitted modes was increased to 6 DP spatial LP modes [8]. However, the work in [8]
required six 4-port oscilloscopes and corresponding optical coherent receiver front-ends.
Currently only one research group in the world has been able to invest in the resources
required for such experimental demonstrations, other SDM research groups continue to work
on 3 spatial LP mode transmission [9,10]. Due to this limitation, more recently, SDM research
is focusing on the integrations of 3 and 6 spatial LP mode transmission components, such as
amplifiers [11], wavelength selective switches [12]. It is important that required SDM
components are developed further, however note that without the required receiver systems,
these components cannot be validated. In addition, to meet CAGR, further increment in the
number of simultaneously transmitted spatial LP modes should continue to be investigated.
In support of the scaling to more modes, we propose a time domain multiplexed (TDM)
SDM receiver to extend the number of simultaneously received DP modes, which allows for
the reception of >1 mode per 4-port oscilloscope, and hence additional 4-port oscilloscope
and corresponding coherent receivers are not necessary. Employing a 41.7 km 3 mode FMF
transmission experiment, the proposed receiver is successfully demonstrated with quadrature
phase shift keying (QPSK), 8, 16, and 32 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)
transmitted constellations. Therefore, the number of transmitted modes can be increased,
whilst minimizing the financial investment required. Employing this method, the predominant
3-mode setups can easily be expanded to higher number of modes. In addition, a potentially
larger number of research groups can work on SDM systems.
To this end, this paper is structured as follows: first, the proposed TDM-SDM receiver is
described in section 2. In section 3 the experimental setup, which is used to verify the
performance of the proposed receiver is described, and in section 4 the experimental
measurement results are shown and discussed.
2. Proposed TDM-SDM receiver
To alleviate the requirement for more 4-port oscilloscopes for receiving an increased number
of DP spatial LP modes, the time domain multiplexed spatial division multiplexing receiver,
depicted in Fig. 1(a), is proposed. Using the proposed TDM-SDM receiver, we show that both
dimensions for increasing the received number of modes can be simultaneously exploited by
Fig. 1. (a) Proposed TDM-SDM receiver setup. (b) The four time alignment steps comprising
both the optical and digital domain. (c) The 40GS/s oscilloscope screen capture.
using two 4-port oscilloscopes, whilst receiving three DP LP modes. Coherent receiver 1
receives one DP mode (input 1), and Coherent receiver 2 acquires 2 modes (inputs 2 and 3).
In this section, we focus on the signal alignment of inputs 2 and 3 received by Coherent
receiver 2. Note that the local oscillator (LO) section is a copy of the Coherent receiver 2
signal path.
For MIMO systems, it is mandatory that the received modes are correctly aligned in time
at the input of the MIMO DSP block, which is further detailed in section 3. At the output of
the mode demultiplexer (MDMUX), also further detailed in section 3, the transmitted signals
are always aligned in time. Therefore, the most obvious choice is to use one DP coherent
receiver per input to directly connect the mode demultiplexer to the MIMO DSP input.
However, in between the mode demultiplexer output, and MIMO DSP input, the timing
alignment can be freely rearranged, as long as the timing boundary conditions are satisfied.
By employing the following four steps, the timing boundary conditions can be satisfied, and
the number of required 4-port oscilloscopes can be reduced. These steps are, depicted in Fig.
1(b): In step (1) each received input signal passes through a shutter or switch, where the
(continuous) signal is allowed to pass at selected time slots. The shutters, or switches, open
and close simultaneously to create a windowing function. In this work, an acoustic optical
modulator (AOM) is used as shutter, where AOM1 and AOM2 act as shutters for inputs 2 and
3, respectively. The AOMs are driven by a 27MHz sinusoidal RF signal. Consequently, this
adds a 27MHz frequency offset to the signal. At step (2): one input is delayed in time with
respect to the other in the optical domain. In this work, a 2.45km single mode fiber is used to
delay the input 3, which results in an 11 µs time delay. To keep the optical power equal for
both inputs, the input 2 path is attenuated by a variable optical attenuator (VOA). At Step (3):
both the separate received inputs are then combined by a 2 × 1 combiner, amplified, and
received by Coherent receiver 2. Amplifying after the combiner reduces the number of erbium
doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) required. However, each input can also be separately
amplified in step (1). The input signal of the Coherent receiver 2 is depicted in Fig. 1(c).
Finally at step (4), after the time slotted signal is coherently received by Coherent receiver 2,
and digitized by the 40GS/s 4-port oscilloscope, the time slotted signal is up sampled to
56GS/s. This allows for sample rate alignment between the employed oscilloscopes, which is
the alignment in the parallel coherent receiver dimension. In the digital domain, the signal is
serial to parallel block (S/P) converted to parallelize the incoming serial data blocks in time.
Of course, this structure can be further up scaled to receive >2 inputs with a single 4-port
oscilloscope.
In Fig. 1(a), in the LO path, the signal section previously described is replicated. However,
where LP modes are used as inputs in the signal section, one LO acts as source for all the
inputs in the LO section. The used LO is an external cavity laser (ECL), and is a different
laser than the transmitter laser. It is critical to match the LO phase such that input 2 and 3 beat
with the LO phase, well within its coherence length. Therefore, the 2.45km single mode delay
fibers in the signal and LO section were measured to be within 2 meters (approximately 245
symbols) difference of each other using delay estimation by channel state estimation [13]. In
Fig. 1(a) AOM3 and AOM4 are used as switches. These AOMs are also driven by a 27MHz
sinusoidal RF signal, which shifts the LO frequency by 27MHz. Hence, the frequency offset
of the LO with respect to the signal is cancelled. The proposed SDM receiver performance is
evaluated in an experimental transmission system.
3. Experimental setup
The proposed TDM-SDM receiver is used in the experimental system depicted in Fig. 2. This
section describes the experimental setup in detail, where the transmitter is described in section
3.1. In section 3.2 the mode multiplexer, few mode fiber, and mode demultiplexer
characteristics are detailed. Finally, in section 3.3 the receiver side is described, mainly
Spot Launch
Mode Mux
29.9 km
Few Mode Fiber
11.8 km
Mode Demux
Spot-Based
6×6 MIMO FDE
SDM Receiver
Fig. 1(a)
Fig. 2. Three mode few-mode fiber experimental setup.
focusing on the digital signal processing, which employs the proposed TDM-SDM optical
front-end already detailed in section 2.
3.1 Transmitter
At the transmitter, a 1555.75 nm ECL is used which has a linewidth of <100kHz. The output
is guided through a Lithium Niobate IQ-modulator, where the laser light is modulated by the
output of two digital to analog converters (DACs). Each DAC represents one component of
the 2 dimensional transmitted constellations, the inphase (real) or quadrature (imaginary)
component. The DACs are running on a baud rate of 28GBaud, and a sequence coming from
a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is fed to each DAC separately. In section 2 was
noted that the single mode fiber time delay TSMF is 11 µs, and hence the capture time is 11 µs.
The capture time can be converted to the number of symbols per transmitted polarization Spol
as
TSMF
SPOL = [symbols], (1)
TS
where Ts represents the symbol time. Therefore, the 2.45km single mode delay fiber results in
a capture window of approximately 310,000 symbols per polarization. The transmitted
constellation sequences are offline generated in Matlab before being loaded into the FPGA,
and have a length of 215 symbols. The constellations used in this work are QPSK, 8, 16, and
32QAM. As each constellation carries a different number of bits per symbol, N pseudo
random bit sequences (PRBSs) with length 215 are generated, which are then combined to
form the constellation sequences. The bit allocation and autocorrelation of each constellation
is depicted in Fig. 3. The corresponding sequence autocorrelation plot indicates that there is
no correlation within the generated sequences, with exception of the correlation with itself.
Note that the correlation values have different heights due to the absolute value differences
within the constellations. The plots depicted in Fig. 3 are of utmost importance for the
accuracy of the transmission experiment, as the modulated output of the IQ-modulator is used
to emulate the separate tributaries for the transmitted polarization mode channels.
Accordingly, the output of the modulator is split into two equal tributaries; one tributary is
delayed by 1233 symbols with respect to the other for polarization decorrelation, before being
recombined. This gives an uncorrelated DP signal, which is noise loaded using an attenuator
and an amplified spontaneous emission noise source to characterize the optical signal to noise
Fig. 3. Bit allocation represented by decimal numbers for (a) QPSK, (c) 8, (e) 16, and (g)
32QAM, and transmitted sequence autocorrelation for (b) QPSK, (d) 8, (f) 16, and (h) 32QAM.
ratio (OSNR) system performance with respect to theoretical performance [14]. The OSNR is
determined by an optical spectrum analyzer (OSA). Then, the noise loaded DP signal is split
into three equal tributaries. Two DP tributaries are delayed for mode decorrelation by 2458
and 5236 symbols, respectively, which again indicates that having no correlation in the
transmitted sequence is very important. Therefore, the 3 × 2 transmitted polarization channels
have delays of 1233, 2458, 3691, 5236, and 6469 symbols, respectively. The delays are
estimated using least-squares frequency domain correlation [13]. The three single mode DP
signals are then fed to the mode multiplexer (MMUX) with a 10dBm launch power.
3.2 Mode multiplexer, few mode fiber, and mode demultiplexer
The mode multiplexer is a single stage spot launcher, depicted in Fig. 4(a), and has been
reported in [15]. Three collimated DP single mode inputs are guided onto a three facet mirror,
where each facet represents one input as depicted in Fig. 4(b). The mirror combines and aligns
the three inputs in free-space to allow excitation of certain areas of the few-mode fiber.
Finally, two telecentric lenses with focal length f1 = 150mm and f2 = 2.7mm are used to image
the free-space three spots onto the few mode fiber, as depicted in Fig. 4(c), which then results
in the equal, and thus fully mixed, excitation of the 6 transmitted polarization modes. The
difference between the maximum and minimum excitation of the polarization modes is the
mode dependent loss (MDL), which is within 1dB for the MMUX. The insertion loss of the
MMUX is approximately 4.5 dB. The three LP modes propagate along the 41.7km few mode
fiber [16], after being excited at the transmitter side. The few mode fiber consists of two fiber
spans, which have respective lengths of 29.9km and 11.8km. The differential mode delay
Fig. 4. (a) 3 facet mirror (b) aligning the DP single mode inputs (c) to the few mode fiber core.
Table 1. Fiber properties at 1550nm wavelength.
Few Mode Fiber 1 Few Mode Fiber 2 Unit
Length 29.9 11.8 km
Fiber diameter 125 124.9 µm
LP01-LP11 group velocity 0.067 0.154 ps/m
Differential Mode Delay 2 1.82 ns
LP01 Chromatic dispersion 19.8 19.9 ps/(nm·km)
LP11 Chromatic dispersion 20 20.1 ps/(nm·km)
Mode field diameter LP01 11 11 µm
Mode field diameter LP11 11 11 µm
Effective Area LP01 95 96 µm2
Effective Area LP11 95 95 µm2
(DMD) is defined as the LP01 − LP11 group velocity difference in seconds/meter multiplied by
the fiber length, and is 2 ns and 1.82 ns, respectively. The few mode fiber properties are
shown in Table 1, where Aeff is the effective area of the spatial LP mode.
The MDMUX at the receiver side is the reciprocal setup of the mode multiplexer, where
the fully mixed modes after transmission are split into three DP single mode outputs.
Therefore, each DP single mode MDMUX output contains all 6 transmitted polarization
modes, and is guided to the receiver. The MDMUX insertion loss is 4.5 dB, and the MDL is
within 2 dB.
3.3 Receiver
From the MDMUX, three DP single modes fiber inputs come into the optical front-end of the
SDM receiver. The optical front-end, analog to digital conversion, and digital up sampling to
2 times the baud rate have been detailed in section 2. In the digital domain, there are now
three aligned mixed received modes, and the key processing steps in the receiver DSP have
been depicted in Fig. 2. First, the optical front-end is compensated [17]. Then, chromatic
dispersion estimation and compensation is performed [18]. The next key processing stage is
the heart of the DSP, the MIMO equalizer. In this work, an adaptive step size minimum mean
squared error (MMSE) frequency domain equalizer (FDE) is used [19]. It unravels the
received signal to separate outputs by performing a convolution between the incoming signal
and a weight matrix. This weight matrix is updated heuristically by the data-aided least mean
squares (LMS) algorithm during convergence and decision-directed least mean squares (DD-
LMS) during data transmission. The convergence time is set to be 25,000 symbols. The
MIMO FDE employs the 50% overlap-save scheme, combined with radix-4 256-point Fast-
Fourier transforms (FFTs). Note that in FDEs the even and odd samples are separated and are
symbol spaced due to 2-fold (Nyquist) oversampling. The total impulse response taken into
account in the MIMO equalizer therefore is 128 symbols (4.57 ns), which is larger than the
combined FMF’s DMD of 3.82 ns. Each MIMO equalizer output is fed to a carrier phase
estimation (CPE) stage [20], where the phase noise is estimated and the carrier phase offset
between the transmitter laser and local oscillator laser is estimated and compensated. After the
carrier offset has been removed, the MIMO output error is determined, which provides
feedback for updating the FDE weights. The outputs of this stage are then used for bit error
rate (BER) measurement. The presented BER in the results section is the average over 2
captures, where each capture is 310,000 symbols. Note that Fig. 1(c) shows the two captures
for the two DP inputs received by the single oscilloscope under the proposed receiver scheme.
The first 25,000 symbols are used for initial convergence, resulting in BER averaging over
3.42 million symbols per system OSNR value.
4. Measurement results
The proposed TDM-SDM receiver detailed in section 2 has been verified using the
experimental setup described in section 3, and the experimental transmission results are
shown in Fig. 5. Through this experimental result, we demonstrate that two DP coherent
receivers and corresponding 4-port oscilloscopes can successfully show the transmission of
three DP modes. All 6 transmitted polarization channels carry a 28GBaud QPSK, 8, 16, or
32QAM signal, yielding a total transmitted gross bit rate of 336Gb/s, 504Gb/s, 672Gb/s, and
840Gb/s, respectively, on a single wavelength.
To fully verify the transmission system performance, including TDM-SDM receiver, three
cases are investigated. The performance is shown in Fig. 5 for all four transmitted
constellation types. First, a single mode DP back-to-back (BTB) transmission is performed to
provide a primary benchmark result with respect to the theoretical performance. The BTB
result gives an indication on the error-floor limitations of the transmitter and DP receiver.
Then secondly, a 6 × 6 BTB result shows the transmission performance penalty over the
MMUX, 2 meters of few mode fiber, MDMUX, and SDM-TDM. In addition, it corroborates
that the TDM-SDM receiver performs as a conventional 3-mode receiver. Figure 5 shows that
the 6 × 6 BTB OSNR penalties at the 20% soft-decision (SD) forward error correcting (FEC)
limit with a BER of 2.8·10−2 are 0.4dB, 0.4dB, 0.5dB, and 2dB for QPSK, 8, 16, and 32QAM
with respect to BTB, respectively. We dedicate this OSNR increase to the TDM-SDM LO
alignment tolerance becoming increasingly important as the constellation size scales up, and
to losses in the mode multiplexers and TDM-SDM receiver. Furthermore in Fig. 5 the 41.7km
FMF transmission system results are shown to be 0.5dB, 0.7dB, 1.3dB, and 6.2dB for QPSK,
8, 16, and 32QAM with respect to BTB, respectively. In this case, the increased OSNR
penalty is not only caused by the alignment tolerances, but also by the transmission system
losses. The transmission fiber has an 8.3 dB loss, and the multiplexers have a 4.5 dB loss
each. Taking the 10 dBm launch power into account, the receiver side EDFA increasingly
generates more noise due to amplification. This results in an increased OSNR penalty for the
higher order constellations. These FMF BTB OSNR penalties are similar to previous work
[21]. Note that in [21], binary phase plate mode multiplexers were used. These have an
insertion loss of approximately 8.5 dB, whereas the spot launch mode multiplexers have an
insertion loss of approximately 4.5 dB. By combining the DP channels in the TDM-SDM
-Log10( System BER )

DP
-8
QA
DP M
- Q Th
PS eo
K ry
Th
eo
r y

DP
DP
-3
2Q
-16
AM
QA
Th
M
eo
Th
r
eo
y
ry
Fig. 5. Experimental transmission results for 28GBaud BTB, 6 × 6 BTB, and 6 × 6 41.7 km
transmission. (a) QPSK. (b) 8QAM. (c) 16QAM. (d) 32QAM.
Phase (rad)
Phase (rad)
Fig. 6. (a) DPLL phase output for 10.8µs. (b) DPLL phase output from 10.7µs to 10.8µs
indicating that the two corresponding polarizations correlate, and a small difference is noticed
between received LP modes.
receiver, and taking the AOM insertion loss into account, the total BTB setup attenuation
difference is <3 dB. This result fully substantiates the transmission performance of the TDM-
SDM receiver in a full experimental transmission setup.
As the TDM-SDM receiver receives the DP LP modes in time slots, it is crucial to match
the phase of the LO well within the coherence length of the laser. In this case, 2 spatial LP
modes are time domain multiplexed. When increasing this number, we suspect these
tolerances become more stringent. This is accomplished by replicating the signal path of the
TDM-SDM receiver, as described in section 2. However, the frequency offset between the
transmitter laser and LO for the various transmitted polarization channels is of interest for
further observation. Note that the CPE stage tracks and mitigates the frequency offset and
phase noise, the DPLL output over time is expected to exhibit similar trends for all
polarization mode channels as depicted in Fig. 6. This result is similar as observed in previous
work [20], where three 4-port oscilloscopes were used to acquire three DP LP modes.
Therefore, we can conclude that the TDM-SDM receiver shows very similar performance to
using a number of 4-port oscilloscopes to process individual modes in a few-mode
transmission setup.
5. Conclusion
The proposed TDM-SDM receiver has been exploited to reduce the number of 4-port
oscilloscopes and respective DP coherent receivers. Successful transmission of 28 GBaud 3
spatial LP modes QPSK, 8, 16, and 32QAM over 41.7 km few-mode fiber demonstrates that
the TDM-SDM receiver can reduce the number of 4-port oscilloscopes and DP coherent
receivers without adding a penalty to the measurement result. A second key contribution of
this work is the demonstration of the scaling of the number of received DP mode channels in a
second dimension in addition to the conventional method of adding 4-port oscilloscopes.
Through carrier phase estimation, it is shown that the TDM-SDM receiver performs similarly
as adding additional 4-port oscilloscopes. Key to this performance is the phase matching
between the LO and signal paths particularly when AOM switches are employed to gate the
modes into the receiver. Particularly as the ongoing challenge in few-mode systems is to
increase the number of transmitted modes, it is highlighted that this proposed method is an
order of magnitude cheaper than scaling conventionally by adding oscilloscopes. This method
potentially allows a greater level of output on spatial division multiplexed systems research.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially funded by the EU FP7-ICT MODE-GAP project under grant
agreement 258033, and by the IT R&D Program of MKE/KIAT (2010-TD-200408-001),
Republic of Korea.

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Time domain multiplexed spatial division

Abstract: A novel time domain multiplexed (TDM) spatial division

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